Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday December 10, 2012 @06:27PM
from the all-I-want-for-christmas dept.

An anonymous reader writes "BSNES author and game collector Byuu has decided to put his entire collection of SNES games up for sale — at the low price of 24,999USD. The collection covers *every* game ever made for SNES, all in the original covers. From the article: 'The seller, who goes by the name "Byuu" on Reddit, says that every single game in the collection comes with its original box and approximately 85 percent of the games come with their original manuals. The collection does not include unlicensed games, and every game has been professionally cleaned and tested. "They all work perfectly," Byuu says.'"

These belong in a public museum, not some private collection. I hope that somebody who is rich and who appreciates video games makes the purchase, and donates them to the Smithsonian or some other reputable museum so that they can be publicly displayed for all to see and to experience.

When you see some of the hardware tricks they pulled to get things to perform back in those days, sometimes not. Consider timing tricks for changing screen modes in the middle of a screen update or similar.

There are plenty of extant copies of any of these vintage (not even antique) consumer goods. I agree that these are as culturally important as anything else in an art museum, but this sale doesn't in any way hinder industry.

Besides, even if you ignore these games entirely, byuu has done far more than $25,000 worth of work preserving these games. Bsnes is arguably not just the best snes emulator but the most accurate emulator ever, which is likely to survive much longer than the cardboard, plastic and silicon being sold.

They belong as roms on the internet for people to pay. It is utter Bullshit they are locked up and hidden because of incredibly stupid laws and insanely selfish and greedy people.

The man needs to let someone carefully read every single rom and put them up on the net so that future generations can enjoy each one. It would hurt nobody in any way possible, I dont care what some scumbag lawyer says.

I agree with you completely. Read up on what Rufus Pollock, a Harvard professor found after doing research on copyright. The optimal length is 14 years, of which all SNES games have passed. Anything longer is corporate greed.

As far as letting someone read them, that is exactly why I bought them in the first place. I read every one by hand with my own custom hardware (here [byuu.org] is a picture of my setup.) This allowed me to image the entire function of the PCB, not just the ROMs like current dumps. I also scanned every box, cartridge and PCB. I then put up all the information in my online database here [byuu.org]. I can't distribute the ROM images for legal reasons, but by comparing my SHA256 hashes to yours, you can verify your ROMs are legitimate and unmodified, clean dumps.

Has there been any meaningful movement on making a SNES emulator that works more like say MAME where instead of a single ROM file you get a separate file for individual ROM chips and other data-holding devices in it and then some sort of description that links up the different chips (ROM, RAM, SRAM, co-processors, discrete parts etc) in the right way?

See my database here [byuu.org]. Each game gets a manifest file that describes the board layout and each individual memory chip.

The difference between my approach and MAME's, is that my board descriptions are external to the emulator, and not bundled in an internal database. And I also store all the files inside a unique folder per game, rather than inside a ZIP archive per game. That approach lets me put save game data into the folders as well. The database I linked can gener

14 years with a 14 year extension, and I'd agree to maybe one or two more if the owner of the copyright really wants to keep it. I bet the makers of half those games don't exist or even care about their copyright on these old games anymore and wouldn't have renewed, so they should be public domain by now.

These belong in a public museum, not some private collection. I hope that somebody who is rich and who appreciates video games makes the purchase, and donates them to the Smithsonian or some other reputable museum so that they can be publicly displayed for all to see and to experience.

Museums are for conservations of material goods. Libraries are better to spread ideas in whatever form they come in.

Museums are not lacking in material, I can assure you. Smithsonian only displays a tiny, tiny fraction of its inventory at any one time, and a smaller amount on tour somewhere, much of it is in warehouses, many never to see the light of day in my lifetime for want of display space. Many people I know who donated anything from their great-great-....grandfather's civil war canteen to their grandfather's US Army uniform to a local Museum often were shocked to see that stuff put up for auction from same museum. Because the museum preferred the money for budget/projects rather than common to even somewhat rare (but not especially valuable) items. It's even known some curators of smaller museums that even deal in/steal/pilfer goods and replace them with copies.

Maybe, sometime, somewhere a super nintendo with a super mario cartridge belongs in a museum somewhere. But certainly not the whole collection. It's just going to collect dust and not going to introduce more people to the joys of that era. Private collectors would be great to care for that.

That makes about as much sense as giving books to a museum to spread ideas. That's where a library is more appropriate. If you really want to get that, you would call for liberalizing copyright law. Tie it to patent length or something and only keep trademarks as ongoing. That way it would be legal to have the entire library up and served on the internet for generations to come and have people actually play them, if they so chose.

I don't think it's going to be much of an experience in 100 years to go to a museum, and look at video game and dvd titles, that you may play for 5 minutes because of a line or see for 5 minutes in some demo. That would surely be a stunted experience.

These belong in a public museum, not some private collection. I hope that somebody who is rich and who appreciates video games makes the purchase, and donates them to the Smithsonian or some other reputable museum so that they can be publicly displayed for all to see and to experience.

The physical goods should be surely in the care of some good museum, but the digital games should be in public domain for everyone to enjoy, not just for ultra rich people who are able to afford this overblown price.

The thing I disliked most was the way emulated images do not come with any box art or instruction manuals. That was always part of the fun as a kid for me.

Ironically, you can consider my effort to be undermining the very value of owning the set: I've scanned all of this stuff in at high resolution so it'll be available long after the games are gone. That's why I bought them in the first place. I'm only selling them so I can buy more games from other regions to do the same.

Before reading the linked pages, I was actually worried that you were giving up on emulation/BSNES. Good to see that you're not only not giving up on it, but actually doing this as a way of preserving a part of gaming history. That's definitely a good thing.

That's absolutely fantastic. I was about to say that I think there's no problem as long as all the stuff's archived.

Also, your emulator is really great; I love it. Far better than the alternatives for SNES, and with one or two exceptions, it's the best emulator for every system it supports (at least that I've tried).

About a dozen were unfindable, I had to trade three of mine to get unfindable boxes, too. The rest were unaffordable. I completely maxed out my 401K loan, and my savings are empty. I can't continue buying until this set sells. Otherwise I would have loved to have listed it as a 100% CIB set. Probably could have made 50K just from some rich person not wanting to spend a decade searching. Note: only one person in the world is known to have a 100% CIB US set, DreamTR.

But you can't download an arcade where every game is 25 cents to play, not counting the many many gameovers that leave you needing more. You can't download that first gameboy your older cousin lent you for the week to play Dr. Mario over and over again just so you could beat his high score. You can't download the way it made you feel to finally get to the third stage of a boss that had kept illing you over and over before you knew how to time your attacks while avoiding theirs.

And twenty years from now, gamers from today won't be able to download the group dynamics of their MMO clan, won't be able to download the step by step evolution of Minecraft indev with it's back and forth between Notch and the smaller community. They won't be able to download all the achievements, trophies, ranks, and golden guns from their favorite FPSs. They won't be able to download the connection made between shiningly creative Little Big Planet level authors after wading through the seas of shoddily-made CoD clones and Mario levels.

I just recently got a smartphone capable of playing these old SNES games. I might download an emulator and play some games. But gaming on a touchscreen smartphone will never be the same as sitting on the carpet with my siblings, racing through the ghost levels on Super Mario Kart and figuring out exactly where to use my jumping feather to get an edge towards victory.

No, but soon ill be able to deploy an internet connected mini arcade machine (picade.com) at mine and my nephews desk and we can play arcade Street Fighter II against each other over netplay. New times, new experiences, new avenues to rediscover old joys.

It's easier to deal with full sets so you're sure you have something when you want to play it than it is to assemble a "best of" collection. They're only a meg or two a piece. And there's always that day when you want to experience just how bad some of the bad games really are. It helps you appreciate the good games more.

Yeah, just like I have time for MST3K and Weird Al. It amuses me. Not every moment of your life has to be spent in the persuit of perfection. Besides, some of these games have some interesting ideas, even if they're poorly executed.

I think his point was that there are so many -good- games out there that there's not enough time to enjoy them. Why waste the time with bad games? I don't think they have the same "so bad it's good" value as some bad movies do. Bad games are just frustrating.

The great thing about emulators is that you can blunt the harder parts of almost any game if needed. For example, the NES emulator i use on DS has a rewind time button mapped to a shoulder button, its fantastic. Add in save states, game genie code and any game can be looked at painlessly for nostalgia, just like we can use Fast Forward to skip stupid parts of bad movies.

I think his point was that there are so many -good- games out there that there's not enough time to enjoy them. Why waste the time with bad games? I don't think they have the same "so bad it's good" value as some bad movies do. Bad games are just frustrating.

Bad games can be entertaining in different ways, like for purposes of study. For example, what is it about Wizard of Oz that makes it a bad game? If you don't play it, you don't know. Angry Nintendo Nerd did an overview of it so I guess you don't have to play THAT one. But it's definitely worth looking into what works and what doesn't work in gaming, if you're a fan at all.

It's a licensed retail only set. Donkey Kong Country Competition was another game sold only after a Blockbuster competition. Mountain Bike Rally + Speed Racer was another game that was only sold by mail order for $200 after you bought a $4,000 exercise bike. Noah's Ark 3D was an unlicensed game sold in Christian book stores. MACS was a training game designed for use in the US military. Powerfest '94 and Campus Challenge '92 were produced for their respective competitions, and were supposed to be destroyed (two of each were not.) SNES tester decks existed only inside Nintendo repair centers. This can pretty much go on forever, so you have to draw the line somewhere. However, many can legitimately say it's not a complete set if their definition includes any of the above.

Slightly more restricted than "every SNES game", it's actually every regular-release SNES game sold at retail in the US, Canada, and/or Mexico. He bought them to improve the emulation quality of his emulator, bsnes.

He says he'll use the proceeds of this sale to purchase other SNES games he doesn't have, such as assembling the complete collection of games released in Europe.

So a funny thing about unwanted items, in the scrap steel industry, when buying/importing cars,containers, and things that have open cavities from Japan it is a common problem to find them stuffed with garbage.

Shipping via free local pick up only. Looks like I'll have to pass. There's also the issue of me not having $25k to spend on 721 SNES titles but the shipping clearly is the bigger problem since I don't live in Ohio.

The PCB contacts were scrubbed with sodium hydroxide (to remove oxidation) and isopropyl alcohol (to remove residue.) Took about five minutes per cart. Which is about 60 hours of labor. Not a whole lot, it just ensures that every game will turn on with your very first try, and you won't dirty up your SNES connector on these carts.

The PCB contacts were scrubbed with sodium hydroxide (to remove oxidation) and isopropyl alcohol (to remove residue.) Took about five minutes per cart. Which is about 60 hours of labor. Not a whole lot, it just ensures that every game will turn on with your very first try, and you won't dirty up your SNES connector on these carts.

Not that I have the money to purchase this set, but would you have any recommendations for cleaning the inside connections of an SNES as well? Is that necessary, or are you likely to further damage/corrode the connections? I realize that since cartridges are external they're more likely to pick up dust and moisture, but I imagine after 20 years the inside of my SNES could probably use some work too.

You'll want isopropyl alcohol and something like DeoxIt to remove/prevent any oxidization. You need something of equivalent thickness to the original PCBs that went into the connector with cotton on the outside. Apply your cleaner, and make sure to only insert it vertically. Move to the sides and you can bend the pins. Make sure the system dries completely before powering it on.

Would also suggest you Google edge connector cleaner for alternate methods. Quite a few people have tricks for it involving erasers and such.

I am probably underselling myself here, but I would likely accept the first serious offer for $20K or above.

That may seem like a lot, but if you do completed auction searches on eBay, you will see that the top dozen or so games (EarthBound, Hagane, Harvest Moon, Incantation, Aero Fighters, 3 Ninjas Kick Back, Metal Warriors, Mega Man X3,...) routinely sell for $400-1000 a piece when complete in box. The next four dozen easily command $100-350. That leaves you with about $5 per complete in box game for the rest, in a market where the prices have continued to rise steadily for the past several years.

Have you thought about an Indiegogo campaign or Kickstarter to fund your effort for European and Japanese cartridges?

Crowd-funding of projects is hot right now and it might be easier to find thousands of people who think your efforts are worth $10 to them than to find a single person willing to part with $25,000 for old game cartridges.

Willing to try it I suppose. A lot of the trouble is finding the games in the first place. For that, I am going to need people in Europe and Japan who can scour game shops, build up small bundles and ship them internationally all at once. Many of them will be very, very hard to find at all.

Well, for what it's worth, both Kickstarter and Indiegogo let you build up a list of people interested in your projects and send them updates on your project's status. You could send e-mails specifying cartridges you need to your entire list of funders and as long as you don't do it to often (i.e. less than once a month) people probably won't find it intrusive.

Not really at the moment, but thanks for the offer. I often post on board.byuu.org about which games I need for the current set being built; I'll probably have a list up after the US set sells. Any help finding missing games from anyone would be appreciated, and I would of course pay for them.

Per the auction details, "All 721 games sold at retail in the United States, Canada and Mexico are included. What is *not* included is any not-for-resale, unreleased, and unlicensed games."

That statement is factual. I ran out of space in the title to add the latter part, but it's at the very top of the auction details. Missing games are Mountain Bike Rally+Speed Racer (mail order only), Donkey Kong Country Competition (some Blockbusters sold their competition carts instead of destroying them), Star Fox Super Weekend (Nintendo Power sold off its surplus by mail order), Noah's Ark 3D (unlicensed game sold in Christian book stores), MACS (only used by the US military, never sold and the only copies remaining are stolen from the US government), Campus Challenge '92 (destroyed after competition, only two survived), Powerfest '94 (same thing as Campus Challenge '92), and various hardware testing carts (used by Nintendo repair centers.)

Everyone has their own opinion of what comprises a complete set. Some people further insist on having every revision of every game, and every alternate box art and manual printing. Some people include prototypes (where it's impossible to own all of those), on and on. You are welcome to your opinion that this isn't a complete set per your definition. It is per the definition I am going by.

He says he's dumped them all (made copies), and now is looking to sell them. Doesn't anyone see the legal issue here?

Depends on where he lives; this is perfectly legal in some places, but not the US. In many countries it's kosher to make a copy and sell the original. The trick is that you can't sell or distribute the copy -- personal use only.

Please don't do this. It took certainly great effort to make proper dump of each game you have. Don't let this effort go to waste due to some idiotic laws and rather then deleting the ROMs, share then via some p2p network like bittorrent - http://thepiratebay.se/ [thepiratebay.se]There are certainly people who will help you to share your roms anonymously, if you are afraid to share them yourself.

He says he's dumped them all (made copies), and now is looking to sell them. Doesn't anyone see the legal issue here?

It's likely fair use, because it's a personal copy, for use in testing/refining his coding that emulates a SNES and interoperates
with the software, and doesn't impact the commercial value of the product, as it's not for sale anymore -- and he's
not consuming the content.

S&A Group were the vendors of a cart dumper called the "PROM Blaster" for Atari 2600 videogames... The archival exception for computer software did not apply to programs stored within permanent storage media (in this case a videogame cartridge) because these forms of media are not subject to the sort of risks that the archival clause was designed to guard against. As a result, the court ruled that dumping a videogame cartridge for archival purposes is not covered by the archival clause of copyright law.

And that's without considering the fact that the guy is selling the original ROMs.

I think it's funny how this is listed at $24,999, as if someone is going to say "Well, $25,000 is simply too much, take a dollar off and I'll consider it".:-)

Why not? It works. There's a reason why prices everywhere are always ending in '.95', or '.99' in countries that still have cents. Even if only subconsciously, it makes a difference to people's perception of the cost. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing [wikipedia.org]

The theory of psychological pricing is controversial. Some studies show that buyers, even young children, have a very sophisticated understanding of true cost and relative value and that, to the limits of the accuracy of the test, they behave rationally. Other researchers claim that this ignores the non-rational nature of the phenomenon and that acceptance of the theory requires belief in a subconscious level of thought processes, a belief that economic models tend to deny or ignore. Research using results from modern scanner data is mixed.

I hope you have to write software to deal with other people's legacy crap some day, so you can know how it feels to be continuously cut up by hacks that have become standard practice before you.

FYI, cartridge folders will not be required for a later version of higan/bsnes. The intention was not to make it difficult to use ROM files, just to get ROM loading hacks out of the emulator. In the next version, in fact, you will be able to load.sfc files without problem.

And if you're going to complain about having to have your ROMs in an extension that makes more sense, that's your prerogative. Likewise if you insist on having a 512 byte header that is not actually part of the ROM nor any standard that contains no useful information. But don't go around preaching because people aren't doing things your way. Just because your 15 year old emulator supports it does not mean it is a good thing to support.

If renaming a file is too much work for SNES emulation, you clearly don't give a fuck about quality in your software. Go grab an old copy of ZSNES, a juice box and get back to those Super Mario World rom hacks.